NewEgg Phenom prices point to unofficial AMD price cuts

AMD has unofficially cut prices on the Phenom 9500 and 9600, while introducing …

AMD cut prices this week on its two available Phenom models, with the 9600 (2.3GHz) dropping to $239 and the 9500 (2.2GHz) falling to $199. The price cuts don't appear to be official; AMD's pricing information still lists the 9600 as a $283 part with the 9500 at $251. Whether official or not, the new Phenom prices position both cores much more attractively against Intel's Q6600. The $199 Phenom 9500 should be a particularly good deal for anyone looking to build a budget quad-core rig. As an aside, I can't help but marvel at the fact that the words "budget quad-core" even belong in the same sentence. Just three years ago, four XeonMP or Opteron 8xx cores would have cost thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the motherboard cost.

AMD also launched its next "Black Edition" overclocking-friendly processor this week and expects immediate availability. The new BE is based on a Phenom 9600 and, like the other Black Edition CPUs, features an unlocked multiplier. Unlike the 5000+ Black Edition, which commands a small price premium over the standard 5000+, the new 9600 BE will sell for exactly the same price as a current Phenom 9600.

At this point, if I personally had need of a quad-core CPU, I'd take a serious look at the Phenom 9500. While it's not as fast as Intel's Q6600, it's significantly cheaper, and I'm not concerned about AMD's TLB bug ever affecting any type of workstation or user workload I could throw at the CPU. AMD has repeatedly emphasized that the TLB erratum is incredibly unlikely to ever appear on a desktop or workstation system, and I'm willing to take their word for it. The fact that the BIOS-level fix forces Phenom to take a further performance hit isn't something that concerns me overmuch, considering that upcoming versions of AMD OverDrive will provide end-users with the ability to manually disable the fix and regain lost performance.

History has proven that consumers have a tendency to avoid what they see as a "buggy" processor regardless of whether or not the bug is likely to ever impact their computer's stability, performance, or reliability, and I expect Phenom's TLB erratum to be no exception to this rule. Nevertheless, a quad-core CPU for $199 is interesting enough to consider on a workload-by-workload basis—and if the chip turned out to be a good bargain, I'd definitely buy one.